


Halcyon: idyllic | peaceful | prosperous | winter solstice | wings (of wax).

by orphan_account



Series: Fullmetal Femslash February 2014 [17]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Detective Noir, F/F, Femslash, Femslash Challenge 2014, Femslash February, Intrigue, Mild Sexual Content, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-18
Updated: 2014-02-18
Packaged: 2018-01-12 21:37:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1201531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>During her years in the private investigations business, Riza Hawkeye has learned two things: First, that </em>grief <em>is a secondary response to be examined, analysed, and ultimately felt in the safety of her home under the soft lights of a case closed. Second, that </em>love<em> ceases to exist the instant she opens the door to her office. And continues to relish its nonexistence as long as the murder case swings harsh white brightness from the bare bulbs adorning the hilt of Damocles’ sword.</em></p><p>After the death of private investigator Maes Hughes, investigators Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye search for his murderer. Unfortunately for Hawkeye, a woman in black breezes through the doorway to toss a seemingly unrelated missing persons case in her lap. But little by little things are adding up, and two distinct halves of Hawkeye's life are about to collide in the centre.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Halcyon: idyllic | peaceful | prosperous | winter solstice | wings (of wax).

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Femslash February. Prompt N4 on my bingo card, "Cop/Detective AU". Also written because Solaris as Lust's alias is a fucking brilliant damn fuck piece of shit Arakawa-sensei you are killing me here. Slightly inspired by _Baccano!_ I suppose?
> 
> This takes place in a sort of word alternate universe type of thing. It's partially AU and partially not. Either way, enjoy.
> 
> For those confused: Canonically, the members of Team Mustang all have codenames for the flowershop spy ring. Vato Falman is Vanessa; Kain Fuery, Kate; Jean Havoc, Jacqueline; Heymans Breda, Bradykins; Riza Hawkeye, Elizabeth. The only one I made up was Missy for Roy Mustang. The flower language code itself should be pretty easy to decipher and is not necessary to understand the fic!
> 
>  _Solaris_ the novel is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys science fiction, character studies, or, hell, exploration of humanity.
> 
> Unedited/unbeta'd/etc. Enjoy at your own risk!

During her years in the private investigations business, Riza Hawkeye has learned two things: First, that _grief_ is a secondary response to be examined, analysed, and ultimately felt in the safety of her home under the soft lights of a case closed. Second, that _love_ ceases to exist the instant she opens the door to her office. And continues to relish its nonexistence as long as the murder case swings harsh white brightness from the bare bulbs adorning the hilt of Damocles’ sword.

“Kate,” she says into the receiver curving around her ear and chin, “did Missy want chrysanthemums or gladioli flowers again?” _Is Mustang still in mourning, or has he recovered his wits?_

She hears voices across the line, muffled and staticky, as though Fuery were covering the mouthpiece with his palm. The crackles clear. “Chrysanthemums at the moment, but she’s possibly having second thoughts. You should attend the other customers, Elizabeth!” Fuery fakes a chuckle. “I’ll let you known when Missy finally makes up her mind! You know how she is.”

“Unfortunately.” Replacing the receiver in its black cradle, she touches the circular pattern the rim has marked into her skin. The file lies open on her desk: photographs of a phone booth, of a body covered in its own blood, of the single shot at point-blank that stole away the life of her and Mustang’s best friend.

No. Of Maes Hughes, private investigator. _Friend_ is a word for nights curled up in blankets and safe from the grey-tinged barrel of guns. Despite Fuery’s advice, she begins to go through the evidence anew, seeking answers to questions not yet on her tongue.

 

Even before she hears the knock on the door Black Hayate is growling. “Come in,” Hawkeye calls, her fingers curling automatically around the safety of the handgun at her hip. The woman who breezes in draws her attention as a flame draws the fallen leaves into its warm embrace. If there existed a string of sounds in the Amestrisian language to describe a bombshell blonde with the light snuffed out to a blackness like the dark side of the moon, the woman stretching herself luxuriously in the chair across the desk would embody the word in every shade—and shadow—of its meaning.

The woman in black delicately unclasps a thin cylinder to withdraw a long, equally thin cigarette. She requests a light. Nudging aside a pair of spare white gloves, Hawkeye procures the lighter. A flicker of fire. With pale smoke wisping from the glowing tip of the cigarette perched daintily between her fore and middle fingers, the woman in black quirks a mouth scarlet as blood. “Good evening. I understand that you specialise in cases of missing persons. Unless Riza Hawkeye, alas, is a missing person herself.”

Hawkeye raises an eyebrow. “You have the correct office, at the least. My compliments to your ability to follow a map.”

“Mm.” Leaning forward, the woman in black rests her elbows on the desk, and her nearly luminous breasts are dangerously close to slipping out of said sable slip that clings to the woman’s skin like peel to a ripe fruit. Hawkeye keeps her gaze at the woman’s violently violet eyes, the fires of hell contained in her irises and quenched with the waters of distant bliss, if not heaven. “I happen to be missing a person, then.” When she runs her moist tongue over her lower lip, Hawkeye can hear her weighing each word on that darkly wet pink tongue of hers. “Misplaced, one might say.”

“And what would sort of person would you have misplaced?” Simple thoughts: the whiteness of the blank paper; the smooth feel of the pen cupped in the palm of her left hand; the faint thud as she props the back of the notebook against the sturdy table maintaining a professional seven degrees of separation between her and her client. The image forms: A lanky early-twenties individual the appearance of an androgynous teenager. Gelled black hair, folded needles in a pincushion of pain. A master of disguise. Possibly going by the name Iago Midori or possibly not. Yes, like the character from the play. Occasionally calls zemself Enbi. No, not like that. When the woman in black takes the pen Hawkeye feels the heat between their hands, the contact, the pulse of electricity. In tight cursive loops she writes: _Envy_.

A mountain of miscellaneae. Purple eyes, akin to the tyrian of the ancient Xerxians. Hawkeye underlines the colour. “A sibling?”

“One might say.”

She locks the file in a suitcase with two locks and a combination she keeps turned away the client and her glittering irises. At length, extinguishing the smouldering edge of her cigarette with her lips, the woman in black hip-sways to the door. “Oh.” Hawkeye resists the urge to slap herself. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t.” The woman tightens her gloved grip on the doorknob, her fingers long and slender and Hawkeye imagines _warm_. “But you may call me Solaris. Solaris Lem.”

“Solaris Lem,” Hawkeye echoes.

“I will contact you via telephone tomorrow night.” The woman— _Solaris Lem_ —smiles, her teeth pointed and sharp in that perfect manner of leaving love bites over pale flesh; Hawkeye adjusts her shirt until her collar brushes against her jaw. “It’s a date.”

With that Solaris Lem shuts the door softly behind her. Hawkeye hears no footsteps on the other side, as if the woman somehow floats across the floor on an angel’s wings.

 

Hawkeye excuses herself from work on the Maes Hughes case to, as she informs Bradykins and later Vanessa over the telephone, take care of some personal troubles; she leaves the flowershop in Jacqueline’s more than capable hands.

By the time Solaris Lem returns the call the subsequent evening, Hawkeye has several leads stacked in neat folders on her desk. Solaris inquiries if she may accompany the private investigator. When Hawkeye nods, Solaris thanks her and bids her good night.

It takes Hawkeye several minutes to start wondering how Solaris could have known _over the phone_.

 

Kate keeps her informed in daily telephone calls. “Gabby—” The government. “—suspects she has a new order: marigold, adonis, ranunculus, iris, aloe, raspberry, oleander, saffron, and scabious. But you known how indecisive she is, and there’s an excellent chance she won’t place an order for a bouquet at all.”

“In the event that Gabby does place the order, inform me, will you? I’ll be fine with delivering the bouquet.”

Several days later Bradykins indicates that Maria Ross is officially dead and realistically moved to Xing until the case can blow over. “Ach, that Gabby,” Hawkeye jokes over the line, “you know how she is with her rare flowers and all.”

“Of course,” agrees Breda. “But _Xing_? It’ll take forever for the flowers to show up here, even with express mail, but I’ve already guaranteed her a safe arrival.”

“Good.” Hawkeye hangs up the phone. The cradle _clicks_ faintly as the receiver connects. Then she circles various areas on the map in pen as scarlet as Solaris’s lips. “Here is where we’ll begin.”

 

Solaris proves adept at intimidating patrons at speakeasies, from the casually dressed to the stylishly dangerous. They whisper about a girl, a boy, an enby, a man, a woman who fits the descriptions Solaris tosses out. Master of disguise, Hawkeye reminds herself, but then Solaris is asking: _Was he blonde? Did sie have syr hair up in a ponytail? Was she plump? Did xe wear a red dress? Was ve of Asian descent?_

There is something to be said, Hawkeye supposes as she averts her gaze, to the lethal power of beauty. And when, at the conclusion of a particularly brutal interrogation, Solaris clasps her wrists and presses her mouth onto Hawkeye’s, the investigator is less surprised by the action as by how long it took for the barriers between to break.

 

Maria Ross, hidden under the floormat of the vehicle of the Xingese ambassador who just so happens to look like Jean Havoc in a wig, recounts her version of events, a version fact-checked against three others’ with almost no chance of having conferred with Ross beforehand. “It is impossible for Rose to want the marigold-hyacinth mix,” observes Vanessa, “so we’re moving onwards to examine other possibilities.”

“How’s Missy?”

“Huh? Oh, Missy’s doing better.” Hawkeye hears static: Falman is shifting uncomfortably. “She wanted to know when you were rejoining the shop, actually.”

“When my personal problems are no longer personal,” she replies, and she’s surprised at the truth that spills from her lips, “then I’ll be able to concentrate on the flowers again.”

Silence for a second or two. “All right. Shall I pass the message on, Elizabeth?”

Another silence, this one lengthier and somehow deadlier. Pregnant, perhaps, with possibilities neither she nor Falman wish to voice, because voicing them would make them real, and such possibilities fall strictly under the umbrella of _friend_ and _grief_ and _love_. “If you think it would make Missy feel better, feel free.”

 

They conduct their love affair on moonlit skyline rooftops and between shadowed library shelves. Amid interrogations with bartenders and speakeasy owners they claw at one another’s bodies in their desperate need for heat and contact. Solaris marks her with centimetre-thick red claw-streaks raking down her body to blood. Biting down on Solaris’s shoulder and collarbone, scraping her skin with sharpened nails, Hawkeye frowns at the unyielding white flesh that greets her. Then Solaris kisses her again and the world falls away.

Hawkeye feels half again like a teenager. And then recognises that she never stopped feeling like that at all, but that the world expected her to.

Well. Fuck the world. And also Solaris. Especially Solaris.

 

“We still don’t know who _killed_ him,” Mustang mumbles into the receiver at three in the ungodly morning, “much less where the murderer is.”

“We’re investigators, _Roy_ , not arbiters.” Her ice in her voice silences him. “You shouldn’t be out for revenge.”

“He was my best friend, Riza.”

She lowers her eyelids. “He was my best friend too, you idiot.” When she places the receiver onto the cradle she massages her aching fingers until she feels the tears stinging at her eyes; by the time she reaches the bathroom she’s thrown up twice and Black Hayate whimpers, nuzzling her side with his wet muzzle.

 

“This missing person.”

“Misplaced.”

Hawkeye regards her. “This _misplaced_ person.  A master of disguise?” she asks, buttoning her blouse with fingers still quivering from her fourth climax of the night. In Solaris’s presence Hawkeye feels her imperfections: her scar blooming her back in churning grey and purple like a perpetual unfeeling bruise between her shoulder blades; her left breast, slightly larger than her right; her corded muscles of her limbs, veins visible at the surface when she flexes; her hardened abdominal muscles still ringed with a faint layer of pudge; her inability to apply make-up with gaining the appearance of a six-year-old digging into xir mother’s lipsticks for the first time; her calloused fingertips and broken nails and the scars crisscrossing her arms and chest and belly like a map of Amestrisian train tracks.

Yet in Solaris’s irises Hawkeye sees the glint of a lust so deep it hollows her bones like a bird’s and sculpts her wings of wax. As if Hawkeye were the pinnacle of beauty. As if Hawkeye could be— _could be_ —loved.

Searching for a blade with which to cleave the ice, Hawkeye’s mind happens upon a truffle of worry. “Ze could impersonate, say, a woman in her early forties?”

Solaris curls her tongue between her lips, and Hawkeye forces her hands to remain in her lap. “One might say.”

The investigator unfolds the crinkled list from the pocket of her blouse. Her messy handwriting has been lined with calm cross-outs and corrections, circles and checkmarks, until every address and bar and speakeasy and nightclub and dormitory sports a sickeningly fat black line of silence through the name. “I believe we’ve exhausted all of our leads.”

“Not all.” Solaris has narrowed her tyrian eyes to slits of violet, narrowed her timbre to slits of serenity between silently festering fury, and Hawkeye wonders where and when exactly she fucked everything up. “There _is_ one more location, but the proprietor and I do not see eye to eye. Still, it would, as they say, be worth a shot.”

Solaris pulls her in for a kiss by the collar of her shirt. Instead of a the saccharine salt Hawkeye tastes a last time for everything.

 

They uncover the shivering creature in the back of the Devil Nest’s liquor cellar taking refuge in an emptied casket of 1854 Cretan wine, the reddish liquor pooling copiously around the resting place. Brandishing her gun and clicking off the safety, Hawkeye gestures for Solaris to remain in the safety of the doorway or, better yet, the hallway. Yet the woman slips past her, elegant and dainty on her dagger-pointed heels, and closes her hands around Iago Midori’s throat.

“Envy,” she whispers in a voice sweet and low and sultry. Zir hands go up to scrabble ineffectually at her neck. Dragging Iago Midori towards her by the throat, she takes zir mouth into hers, smearing red over zir lower lip and maybe it’s lipstick and maybe it’s blood Hawkeye observes. Solaris kisses Iago Midori, works her tongue into zir cheek, loosens zir muscles until zir arms lie limply by zir sides. Jealousy tastes ugly and salty in Hawkeye’s mouth and weighs a heavy stone at the bottom of her stomach, almost too heavy,threatening to tear a hole through her abdomen and between her legs to pin her to the floor. “You thought you could take my kill and run. You stupid bastard.”

Before Hawkeye can raise the handgun, Solaris’s fingers elongate into spears, long and slender and Hawkeye imagines _cold_. Envy stares, sneering, into her smirk for an excruciatingly lengthy moment before ze seems to realise zir throat has been pierced through. Ze hangs from Solaris’s wrath like a puppet on excessively cruel strings. Blood gurgles in zir throat and bubbles from air mouth in thick glooping strands that splatter the floor and mix with the stagnating wine.

Withdrawing her left hand from Envy’s neck, Solaris digs her clawed fingers into air chest. Excavates a teardrop-shaped sliver of scarlet that pulsating, a beating heart of crystallised stone. Veins of red and violet audibly tear, spraying blood that bursts into ash prior to touching the ground. “You jealous fool,” Solaris murmurs, and Hawkeye isn’t certain to whom she speaks. Then, tipping her head back, Solaris swallows Envy’s heart. She cuts the puppet’s strings; the puppet melts into dust, into nothingness, into chaos.

Hawkeye empties the clip of both handguns, one after another, into Solaris’s forehead, throat, breast. The woman in black quirks a mouth as crimson as blood. “I enjoyed you,” she says over the frantic rustling of Hawkeye feeding another round into the chamber, “but if you keep that up, I truly will have to end _you_ as well. Which would be quite a shame. For both you and for your precious man, since I’m aware of your utter lack of self-preservation.”

The thought of Mustang losing both pillars of support stays her hand. Without aiming away from Solaris, Hawkeye lowers the gun a fraction of a degree. “Who are  you? No. _What_ are you?”

“With luck, a type of being with which you will never come in contact.” Solaris removes a cigarette from the thin retainer and touches the end to the heated hollow barrel of the handgun. Somehow the tip catches aflame. Smoulders. “An immortal, one might say. We generally don’t interfere with humans. _Ze_ did, which is why I put zem down. Do you understand?”

Slowly, deliberately, Hawkeye inclines her head. The barrel of the gun does not shift. “And ze—this, _Envy_ , as you call zem—killed Maes Hughes?”

“Maes Hughes,” says Solaris with a softness to her timbre that slicks Hawkeye’s innards and leaves them wet and raw, “had become dangerously close to discovering our existence. If Envy had not done something, one of us would have, as few of us as there are.”

The superficially contradictory logic rolls through her mind briefly. Hawkeye pictures, suddenly, a game of chess played across centuries on a checkerboard of blood and flesh, and swallows her tongue. “But you’re allowing me to live.”

“As I said, I enjoyed you.” Solaris tilts her head to one side, as if studying her. “Make any indication that you know of our existence—hint to _anyone_ that immortality can be realised—and make no mistake that you _will_ suffer a fate worse than death.” Her hands tremble. Her hands _never_ tremble, and yet she can see her fingers quivering on the trigger. “Do not make me regret this decision, Riza, because you will feel the same regret many, many times over. Now, may I kiss you good-night, sweet princess?”

“ _No_.” The answer comes with a forcefulness that startles her. Hawkeye readjusts her grip on the gun. “But I would like to ask another favour.”

The cigarette is a slender bone against her blood bow lips. She arches one eyebrow and the other does not move. “Oh?”

“Your name. Like Envy’s. Zir name wasn’t Iago Midori.” The professional tone of Hawkeye’s voice somehow collects her nerves in a bundle and crushes them beneath the desperate need to remain calm. “What . . . what is Solaris’s _real_ name?”

“Ah. I do go by Solaris Lem, at least for the present.” Solaris exhales a ring of smoke that loops about itself to connect, like the vapour were devouring its own tail. “But my name, my _true_ name?” Hawkeye steps forward. The woman in black smiles. Tenderly.

The gun clatters to the floor.

“I, my dear Riza, am Lust.”

 

“Welcome back to the shop, Elizabeth! What was with the absence?”

RIza Hawkeye flips a page idly and stares at the papercut marking a scythe of crimson into her thumb. “Have you ever read Stanisław Lem, Missy? Drachman author. Fascinating novels.”

“Elizabeth?” He sounds concerned. She’s touched, in a distant and apathetic sort of way. “Are you all right?”

She shrugs before she remembers to whom she speaks. “One might say. Though perhaps not _all right_.” She runs her tongue over the papercut to taste copper and death. “I think the word, Missy, is _mortal_.”


End file.
